5

Abused as Never Before

On September 13, 1841, Congress entered recess and Tyler enjoyed a brief respite from the partisan warfare. In October, he left Washington for the first time since April for a trip combining business and pleasure in Virginia. He examined military fortifications and naval installations in Norfolk and Hampton Roads, then moved on to Williamsburg, where he was welcomed by his friends. When he stopped briefly in Richmond, the cool displeasure of the city’s Whigs was evident.¹

Tyler hoped that a negotiated approach might win him support: “moderation,” he once noted, “is the mother of true wisdom.” Unfortunately, as John C. Calhoun feared, the middle ground had fully disappeared. Bank closures and farm bankruptcies led to stunning Whig defeats in the fall 1841 elections, and Democrats took control of governorships and state legislatures from Maine to Mississippi. The “relief and reform” promised by the Whigs in 1840 had not occurred and voters blamed the party. But Henry Clay had another explanation for the electoral catastrophe. “An army which believes itself betrayed by its commander-in-chief, will never fight well under him,” he asserted. Afraid that the Whigs were threatened with extinction, activists decided to back Clay even more intensely. This meant renewing the struggle with Tyler when Congress convened in December. It was “war to the knife,” in historian Michael Holt’s words.²

For Tyler, Washington was again a bed of thorns. In his December message to Congress, Tyler proposed the creation of yet another new banking system, which he called the “Exchequer Plan,” an unstable combination of Whig, Democratic, and Tyler economic principles. One hostile paper called it “a ridiculous imbecility,” another “a dangerous grant, that might subvert the Constitution.” Clay rejected it as the fantasies of “a poor, deluded man,” and tabled it without debate or a final decision. These struggles with the president exhausted Clay, so he resigned his Senate seat to rest and to prepare for the 1844 presidential campaign.³

With the country on the brink of financial collapse and the Compromise Tariff of 1833 due to expire in June 1842, the tariff debate again became bitter. Clay’s surrogates wanted a tariff increase, with protection for specific industries and distribution of funds from land sales. Tyler would not accept distribution or protection, but grudgingly agreed to support a higher tariff that could provide needed revenue. After months of haggling, Congress sent Tyler a bill heavy with Clay’s handiwork. The president vetoed it. So frequent and regular were Tyler’s vetoes that this one was called “his veto of the month.” By now the Whig strategy was clear: produce legislation that the president could not support. “The more Vetoes the better,” Clay chortled. “The inevitable tendency of events is to impeachment.” For Tyler, the battle was no joke. Clay and the Whigs were a threat to the Union. Tyler’s navy secretary spoke the president’s mind when he wrote to a friend: “I should not be surprised to hear of popular outbreaks in all the large cities, and of desperate measures calculated to overthrow all law and order.”⁴

On July 10, following the veto of the latest tariff bill, Congressman John Minor Botts, author of the Coffeehouse Letter that had politically wounded Tyler, introduced a resolution that would create a special committee to investigate whether the president should be impeached, the first time such an inquiry had been called. The resolution was approved and thirteen committee members selected. Tyler enemy John Quincy Adams was elected chairman. When the news reached the president, he was stunned. To his friend Robert McCandlish, Tyler explained, “Did you ever expect to see your old friend under trial for ‘high crimes and misdemeanors?’” he wrote. “The high crime of sustaining the Constitution of the country I have committed, and I plead guilty. The high crime of … daring to have an opinion of my own, Congress to the contrary not withstanding, I plead guilty also to that; and if these be impeachable matters, why then I ought to be impeached … . I am abused, in Congress and out, as a man never was before—assailed as a traitor, and threatened with impeachment. But let it pass. Other attempts are to be made to head me, and we shall see how they succeed.”⁵

Tyler did not receive a fair hearing from Adams’s committee. Its final report, released on August 16, 1842, concluded that Tyler had committed “offenses of the gravest character” and deserved to be impeached, although the committee’s majority did not formally recommend it. Clay worried that such an extreme action might produce a backlash and hurt his chances in 1844. Philip Hone also thought inaction a better course: “Let [Tyler] serve out his time, and go back to Virginia, from whence the Whigs have bitter cause to lament that they ever called him forth.” Still, the majority report was adopted by the House. On August 30, an angry Tyler sent them a statement, arguing that he was “accused without evidence and condemned without a hearing … . I am charged with violating pledges which I never gave … usurping powers not conferred by the law, and, above all, with using the powers conferred upon the President by the Constitution from corrupt motives and for unwarrantable ends … . [T]hese charges are made without any particle of evidence to sustain them, and, as I solemnly affirm, without any foundation in truth.” He asked that his statement be entered in the House Journal, but the request was refused.⁶

Two weeks later, Congress passed yet another version of the tariff bill, dubbed the “Black Tariff” by its Southern critics, and this time Tyler signed it into law. There was much in it that he did not like. It is not clear why he gave in, but the desperate need to fill empty government coffers and a desire to prevent impeachment were probably factors. Perhaps he too was exhausted by this endless wrangling, which coincided with another, more painful crisis: his beloved wife was dying.⁷

Letitia Tyler had never recovered from the stroke she suffered in 1839. In July 1842, Tyler told his eldest daughter, Mary, that her mother’s “mind is greatly prostrated by her disease,” and during the following month she grew weaker. On September 10, she died.

She was the first First Lady to die, and the White House was draped in mourning and the East Room service on September 12 was large and appropriately dignified. The Reverend William Hawley, who seventeen months earlier had conducted the funeral of President Harrison, again officiated. The cabinet attended as did members of Congress, regardless of their party affiliations. President Tyler, accompanied by his family and administration officials and staff, returned Letitia’s remains to Virginia. On September 13, with Richmond’s bells tolling, the procession proceeded to Cedar Grove, her childhood home and the site of their marriage. As her coffin was lowered into the earth, people cried, “Oh, the poor have lost a friend.”⁸

Tyler’s sons, daughters, and grandchildren tried to console him, but they could not ease his grief. “Nothing can exceed the loneliness of this large and gloomy mansion—hung with black—its walls echoing our sighs,” Priscilla Cooper Tyler observed. During the month of mourning that followed, the Whig press refrained from attacking the president and, with uncharacteristic grace, praised the late Mrs. Tyler as an “estimable lady … kind and charitable,” loved and respected by all who knew her.⁹

 

 

Letitia’s death overshadowed Tyler’s first major achievement as president: the successful negotiation of the Washington Treaty, which was approved by the Senate on August 20. The treaty settled several outstanding issues between the United States and Great Britain, whose relations since the 1830s had become seriously troubled.

For Americans, Britain remained the great international bogeyman. In the years following the War of 1812, Britain’s international power and wealth had continued to grow and its navy stood as the greatest in the world. New Englanders felt especially vulnerable given the presence of British troops in Canada, which shared a disputed border with Maine. When a rebellion against Great Britain erupted in Canada in the late 1830s, Americans had sympathized with the rebels, and citizens from Vermont to Michigan actively joined the fight. The British crushed the revolt, but tensions still ran high.¹⁰

In December 1837, British partisans, armed with pistols, pikes, and cutlasses, had attacked and boarded the Caroline, an American steamer in New York waters known to have carried arms to the Canadian insurgents. In the fight that ensued, three partisans were wounded and one American died, apparently from a stray bullet. Passengers and crew were escorted safely to shore, and the battle, such as it was, ended ten minutes after it began. Then the British set the Caroline afire and the ship slowly sank. New Yorkers were enraged, and local newspapers exaggerated the event, calling it a massacre during which two dozen American innocents were slaughtered. The Livingston Register called for “Blood for Blood” until the nation’s honor was restored. President Martin Van Buren had sent General Winfield Scott, dressed in full military regalia, to the New York–Canadian border and the immediate crisis ended without further bloodshed. But the British never apologized or compensated the Caroline’s owners for the loss of their vessel, and Americans cried “Remember the Caroline” and waited for the next incident.¹¹

Their wait ended in the winter of 1837–38, in the Aroostook River Valley, part of the disputed territory that pitted Maine against New Brunswick. The Treaty of Paris, which ended the Revolutionary War with Great Britain, left unresolved the line that separated the northeastern boundary of Maine. The dispute was later submitted to the king of the Netherlands, who issued a compromise that the British accepted but the U.S. Senate rejected. Later attempts at mediation had also failed, and that winter new problems arose. Americans who were settling in the area noticed British interest in a road running through the Aroostook Valley, a safe supply route to reinforce Quebec and Montreal, if military necessity so required. “Britannia shall not rule the Maine,” went one American tune,

Nor shall she rule the water;
They’ve sung that song full long enough
Much longer than they oughter.

Canadians and the Americans again prepared for battle.

The “Aroostook War” was mostly one of words. Nova Scotia’s legislature appropriated funds in case fighting broke out, and Congress authorized President Van Buren to call for fifty thousand volunteers (the regular army then numbered only seven thousand men) and backed them up with $10 million. “If war must come,” proclaimed Pennsylvania senator James Buchanan, “it will find the country unanimous … . The only alternative is war or national dishonor; and between these two, what American can hesitate?”

The American who hesitated was the president, who again sent his peacemaker General Scott. After a year’s hard work, he arranged a truce in March 1839. But the underlying cause of the crisis—the contested border between Maine and New Brunswick—remained a dangerous irritant between America and Britain.¹²

In November 1840, the Caroline affair erupted anew when Alexander McLeod, a Canadian deputy sheriff believed to have been involved in the attack on the ship, was arrested in New York and put on trial for arson and murder. The British strongly protested and informed their minister in Washington that if McLeod was executed it would “produce war, war immediate and frightful.” They could not understand why the U.S. federal government would not intervene in a state’s judicial proceeding. Almost a year had passed before McLeod was acquitted and the crisis was calmed for the time being.¹³

Tyler inherited these “sticks of dynamite waiting to explode.” “The peace of the country when I reached Washington on the 6th day of April, 1841, was suspended by a thread,” he later observed. Then, a new crisis occurred in November. Nineteen slaves imprisoned on the Creole, an American ship bound for the slave markets of New Orleans, rebelled. They murdered slave owner John Hewell, beat the captain and several of his crew, and forced the Creole to sail to Nassau, in the British Bahamas. There, officials bound by Great Britain’s Emancipation Act of 1833, which had abolished slavery, eventually freed all the slaves on board, including the rebellion’s leader, Madison Washington. Southerners were especially angry; Mississippi newspapers suggested that if the United States failed to protect American “property,” there was little reason for any state to remain in the Union.¹⁴

In response, Tyler asked Congress to increase military appropriations to an astonishing $2.2 million and to begin rebuilding the U.S. Navy. The president “is very sore and testy about the Creole,” a British official noted. Not only did British interference vex the president; the incident intensified the clash between slaveholders and abolitionists that Tyler wanted to quell. (One abolitionist, perturbed by the administration’s initial response to the crisis, called Tyler “an imbecile” and Secretary of State Webster “a poor debauchee.”) Although Tyler detested the British, he hoped for a peaceful resolution to the inflammatory issues and he was encouraged by a change in British politics that brought to power a more pacific government. In early 1842, the new Foreign Office sent Alexander Baring, the First Baron Ashburton, to Washington to negotiate a settlement and prevent war.¹⁵

From the American perspective, Lord Ashburton could not have been a better choice. Not only was he the retired head of the prominent British mercantile firm Baring Brothers and Company, which had financed the Louisiana Purchase, he owned over a million acres in Maine that would surely be threatened by a war. His wife, Anne, was Philadelphia-born and the daughter of former U.S. senator William Bingham. Furthermore, Ashburton had employed Daniel Webster as Baring Brothers’ U.S. representative and he and Lady Ashburton considered Webster a good friend; indeed, Webster and his wife had stayed with the Barings during a visit to London three years earlier. When Ashburton was appointed “Commissioner Procurator and Plentipotentiary,” Anne Baring wrote Webster that her husband was well known for being “most zealous” about America’s interests. “If you don’t like him,” she added, “we can send you nothing better.”¹⁶

Webster badly needed a victory, something to prove his worth to those Whigs who felt he had betrayed them by remaining in Tyler’s cabinet. He was also an Anglophile, as witnessed by visitors to his Washington home, Swan House, which was decorated with portraits of Queen Victoria, the Duke of Wellington, and Lord Melbourne. Webster predicted a quick success, telling Philip Hone that “he had the fullest confidence in being able to settle all the differences with England by September.” During the negotiations that ensued, Webster kept the president fully informed. With his domestic initiatives blocked by an intransigent Congress, Tyler enjoyed the freedom that foreign policy gave him.¹⁷

Prior to the start of the talks, Webster concluded that something had to be done to win the support of Maine’s citizens. First, he invited both the Maine and Massachusetts legislatures to send representatives—called “commissioners”—to Washington to participate. More troubling, however, the secretary, with Tyler’s knowledge and approval, sent to Maine “secret agents,” bought and paid for by the government, to “prepare public opinion for a compromise.” Among the group was Jared Sparks, a Harvard historian whose research in French archives had turned up a map thought to belong to Benjamin Franklin, one of the negotiators of the Treaty of Paris of 1783. The map seemed to support Britain’s claims to the Maine territory. Sparks, at Webster’s direction, met with officials of Maine and Massachusetts who, after studying the map, were told that half a loaf was better than none. For his services, Sparks received $250 from the secret service fund; Webster’s chief organizer, a Maine politico and publisher named Francis O. J. Smith, received $12,000. Ashburton paid assorted propagandists a total of about $14,500.¹⁸

The “secret service contingency fund” had originally been requested by President George Washington in 1789, to be used “for the contingent expenses of intercourse between the United States and foreign nations.” By 1791, 10 percent of the federal budget was earmarked for the president’s secret use. In 1810, Congress established a similar fund hidden in the State Department. Washington and his successors dipped into it to obtain foreign intelligence or, in the case of Jefferson and Madison, to subvert foreign governments in the Barbary States and Spanish Florida. Besides trying to influence opinion in Maine, Webster sent agents to disrupt the activities of the “Patriot Hunters,” a radical American group hoping to oust the British from Canada, and the scheme seems to have been the first time that Americans were targets of their own government. These covert agents may only have propagandized—planting articles entitled “Northeastern Boundary—Why Not Settle It?” in newspapers and meeting with state legislators—but for a president who had morally opposed Jackson’s imperial presidency, Tyler was skating on the edge of legality. Indeed, in 1846, after both Tyler and Webster left office, the House of Representatives launched an investigation to determine if the secretary was guilty of “official misconduct” in using funds to influence public opinion in Maine. Tyler rejected the charges and most House members accepted his view that the crisis in Anglo-American relations required this extraordinary action. Those who disagreed wondered if such improper activities were unconstitutional and rose to the level of an impeachable offense. Historian Edward Crapol will not let Tyler off easily. “[I]n this quest for personal vindication and political glory,” he wrote, “John Tyler betrayed and abused his most deeply held principles.”¹⁹

Lord Ashburton and his party arrived in Washington in early April 1842. The first anniversary of President Harrison’s death was being observed throughout the country. In New York, Whig governor William Seward ordered flags flown at half-staff and bells rung. The day also provided Whigs with another opportunity to lament the Tyler presidency. “One year of the rule of imbecility, arrogance, and prejudice,” Hone bemoaned. Ashburton was concerned about the “strange Confused state of government” he observed in Washington—Tyler’s continuing vetoes and the strength of Whig vengeance suggested that perhaps no lasting peace could be achieved. America was “a wild beast,” suffering from “ungovernable and unmanageable anarchy.” To Ashburton, Tyler seemed “weak and conceited.” Nevertheless, he warned the Foreign Office “not to mistake or undervalue the power of this country,” which, in the case of war, would be “immense.”²⁰

Tyler eventually won him. The president made sure Ashburton and his associates had comfortable quarters and were wined and dined. During one week in June, Ashburton attended a wedding reception, for the late president James Monroe’s granddaughter, where the wine flowed so freely that the next day John Quincy Adams complained of being hungover. On June 12, there was a White House gala at which Ashburton enjoyed “dancing in the now gorgeously furnished East Room and an elegant supper,” Adams observed. “The courtesies of the President … to the guests were all that the most accomplished European court could have displayed”—high praise from a man who still considered Tyler “the Accidental President.”²¹

At first, the Webster-Ashburton discussions went smoothly. The two men agreed to focus primarily on the border dispute in the northeast (avoiding a similar entanglement in the Oregon territory) and to communicate informally, without diplomatic protocol; no one kept minutes and nothing would be recorded on paper until an agreement was reached. Despite Webster’s efforts to influence public opinion in Maine, its citizens posed the greatest problem. The state’s commissioners, and those of Massachusetts who stood to profit from the agreement, initially refused to accept a compromise negotiated by Webster and Ashburton. As the talks dragged on through an oppressive Washington summer, Ashburton turned to Webster for help. “I must throw myself on your compassion,” he wrote the secretary in July. “I contrive to crawl about in this heat by day & and to live my nights in a sleepless fever … . I shall positively not outlive this affair if it is to be much prolonged.” ²²

At this point, Tyler stepped in to encourage Ashburton to press on. At a meeting in the president’s office, Tyler displayed his celebrated charm, telling the sixty-seven-year-old diplomat that should he go home, all would be lost. “My Lord,” said Tyler, according to an observer, “I cannot suppose that a man of your lordship’s age and personal position, retired into the bosom of your family after a long and successful life, would have crossed the Atlantic on so arduous a mission, unless you had truly come with the most painful desire to close the unhappy controversies that now threaten the peace … . [I]f you cannot settle them, what man in England can?” Having been called indispensable by the president of the United States had its effect. “Well! well!” Ashburton replied. “Mr. President, we must try again.” The discussions continued until August 9, when a treaty was signed.²³

By the terms of the treaty, the border between Maine and Canada was adjusted along the compromise line. The United States received seven thousand square miles of the disputed territory, Britain the remaining five thousand (which included the needed military route to defend Quebec). Ashburton conceded to the United States Britain’s claim to two hundred square miles at the head of the Connecticut River and accepted New York and Vermont’s borders at the forty-fifth parallel. When the value of the real estate is considered, it is clear that the United States received the better end of the bargain: those seven thousand square miles, it was later learned, held some of the richest iron-ore deposits in the northeast—minerals that would fuel American industry in years to come. To sweeten the deal for those states that lost territory, Maine and Massachusetts were each awarded $125,000.²⁴

Other issues were also resolved. The British fought to protect their right to stop and search vessels believed to be involved in the African slave trade. To Tyler and most Americans, that practice smacked of impressment, one of the issues that had caused the War of 1812. Tyler’s answer was a system by which each nation would police the high seas, and, if the opportunity arose, act in concert against slave traders. In the case of the Creole, the British agreed not to interfere with American vessels driven into their colonies’ ports by bad weather or mutineers. Eventually, the Anglo-American Mixed Claims Commission paid American slave owners more than $100,000 for the loss of their “property.” As for impressment itself, Ashburton promised in an informal declaration that Britain would refrain from stopping American ships to search for British citizens, although they refused to officially renounce the practice. The treaty also revised the law of extradition, describing more specifically what crimes would be covered, “including murder, arson, robbery, forgery, and piracy”; those accused would be returned to the country of birth. Finally, Ashburton commented on the Caroline affair. He expressed “regret” for the sacking of the Caroline, and, though it was not the apology that Americans wanted, Tyler accepted it.²⁵

While all the major participants were generally happy with the treaty, winning the required two-thirds majority of the Senate was not a foregone conclusion. Over Webster’s opposition, Tyler ordered the entire treaty submitted, rather than each of the individual twelve articles, which he believed would invite rejection. Democrats Thomas Hart Benton and James Buchanan attacked the treaty, condemning Webster for “needlessly and shamefully” giving away so much territory to the British. The treaty was “a solemn bamboozlement,” Benton complained.²⁶

Senator William Cabell Rives, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, argued for the president. In an executive session, he showed his colleagues the Sparks map, which indicated how much territory the United States had gained. Senator John C. Calhoun then delivered a speech supporting the treaty and converted some critics. “Peace is the first of our wants in the present condition of our country,” he said. “If we have not gained all that could be desired, we have gained much that is desirable, and if all has not been settled, much has been.” When the final vote was tallied on August 20, 1842, the treaty passed overwhelmingly, with only eight Democrats and one lone Louisiana Whig dissenting. “The work is done, 39 to 9!” a shocked Daniel Webster remarked. Never before in American history had a treaty passed the Senate by so great a majority.²⁷

The Treaty of Washington—better known to later generations as the Webster-Ashburton Treaty—was extremely popular in America but it did not help Tyler politically. Democrats remained cool and Whigs refused to applaud him. At a dinner honoring Lord Ashburton prior to his departure for London, one New York Whig proposed a toast to the president. The room plunged into a “dead … [and] ominous silence.” Even Philip Hone, who often complained of “the faithless and wayward conduct of Mr. Accidental President Tyler,” was shocked by such disrespect for the office of the presidency. The next toast—to Queen Victoria—was received enthusiastically. ²⁸

Tyler’s partners in the negotiations treated him better. Webster appreciated the president’s “steady support and confidence” and “his anxious and intelligent attention to what was in progress.” Writing to Tyler on August 24, Webster said, “I shall never speak of this negotiation, my dear sir, which I believe is destined to make some figure in the history of the country, without doing you justice.” The president appreciated the remarks but did not need them: he was proud of his achievement. That peace which had been suspended by a thread when he took office had been transformed, he later observed, into “a chain cable of sufficient strength to render that peace secure.”²⁹

Tyler was not content merely to settle old boundary disputes. As a graduate of Bishop Madison’s school of “empire and national destiny,” he had long dreamed of an America that stretched from sea to shining sea, “walking on the waves of the mighty deep … overturning the strong places of despotism, and restoring to man his long lost rights.” To further continental expansion, Tyler authorized the Department of the Navy to secretly pay a private firm to transport American settlers to the Oregon territory, then jointly occupied by the United States and Great Britain. As Crapol argued, the move was another exhibition of Tyler’s habit of using presidential power “in foreign relations without legislative sanction or approval.” Similarly, Tyler hoped to enlist British help in convincing the Mexican government to cede California, or at least the important ports of San Francisco and Monterey, to the United States. Neither the British nor the Mexicans were interested, but that did not deter Tyler from sending another secret agent to London to settle the Oregon question and reopen discussions with the Mexicans. That mission failed too.³⁰

His Pacific ventures proved more successful. Responding to the entreaties of missionaries and businessmen, in December 1842 Tyler proclaimed that if any foreign power tried to “take possession of the Sandwich Islands, colonize them, and subvert the native Government,” they must reckon with the United States. Tyler’s sweeping expansion of American influence in the Pacific became known as the Tyler Doctrine. The president also had “his eye fixed upon China” and sent the first official envoy, Caleb Cushing, to open the Celestial Kingdom to U.S. trade. When Tyler learned that Cushing had negotiated the Treaty of Wangxia, opening five Chinese ports to American merchants and granting businessmen and missionaries protection under extraterritoriality, the news sent him “off in an ecstasy.” He hoped for a similar relationship with Japan, but his instructions to Cushing did not arrive before he ended his Asian mission.³¹

 

 

Despite these triumphs on the international stage, Tyler remained a lonely, unhappy man. Time did not heal the wound of Letitia’s death, and visitors to the White House during the December congressional and social season noticed the gloom that hung everywhere. The First Family was still in mourning, so no lavish White House parties were scheduled.

Later that month, however, Tyler’s depression began to lift when twenty-two-year-old Julia Gardiner arrived in Washington and took the city by storm. He was immediately taken with the petite, “buxom dark eyed beauty.” Julia was accompanied by her father, David Gardiner, a lawyer and briefly a New York state senator; her mother, Juliana; and her twenty-year-old sister, Margaret. The Gardiners were Eastern aristocrats, wealthy and powerful, longtime residents of Gardiners Island, a large and lavish private estate of 3,300 acres located off the coast of eastern Long Island. Julia and Margaret were educated at Madame N. D. Chagary’s Institute for Young Ladies, a fashionable boarding school in Manhattan, but were more interested in New York society than in studying French or mathematics. In late 1839, Julia had shocked New York’s social set (and her parents) by posing for an advertisement publicizing Bogert and Mecamly, a clothing establishment located on Ninth Avenue. It was perhaps the first society endorsement for such a business in the city’s history: “I’ll purchase at Bogert and Mecamly’s,” said the sign Julia carried in the picture. “Their goods are Beautiful and Astonishingly cheap.” The city’s “finest” viewed Julia as “cheap” too, once it became known that the pictured woman was David and Juliana Gardiner’s eldest daughter. More scandal followed. A few months later, a long and lachrymose poem dedicated to Julia, “Rose of Long Island,” appeared on the Brooklyn Daily’s front page. “She stole my heart that luckless night,” wrote its author, Romeo Ringdove. Julia claimed that she did not know the pseudonymous poet, but her parents were not appeased.³²

David Gardiner decided it was a good time for the family to tour Europe. They departed in September 1841, and during the following year they met Queen Victoria, whose royal style impressed Julia; King Louis-Philippe of France, who took an instant liking to her; and the pope. Everywhere Julia went she attracted wealthy and titled suitors—barons, counts, government officials. Julia’s older brother, Alexander, kept the family informed of the extraordinary political events then occurring in Washington—the war between Henry Clay and John Tyler chief among them. Since they were running out of countries to see, and Julia was leaving a trail of broken hearts along the way, the family patriarch decided to return home in September 1842. They scheduled a visit to the capital in December.³³

The Gardiners rented rooms at Mrs. Peyton’s Boarding House on Pennsylvania Avenue and had their servant deliver calling cards to the White House. Julia seemed to be everywhere at once. She and Margaret could be found in the House of Representatives gallery, where they entertained their friends and watched “the orators of the day” while they “jumped and screamed and perspired and foamed and as usual made much ado about nothing.” One newspaper noted that Julia was constantly surrounded by congressmen, “grave Senators not too old to feel the power of youth and beauty, Judges, officers of the Army and Navy, all vying with each other to do homage to the influence of her charm.”³⁴

It was John Tyler Jr., his marriage about to dissolve, who invited Julia and her family to the White House for a small Christmas Eve dinner. If she noticed the president, Julia did not remark on it as her attention was monopolized by John Jr. “He laid quite a siege to my heart,” she observed. On January 2, at another White House occasion, she met “his majesty” the president, who she feared would not remember her. No man who saw Julia Gardiner ever forgot her, and John Tyler was no exception. “I hope you are very well,” the president told Julia, taking her hand; Julia was getting over a cold and was amazed that Tyler was aware of it. In a poem Tyler later wrote, he confessed to being attracted to Julia’s “raven tresses” and “eyes … which beamed as bright as stars.”³⁵

Julia and the president became especially close at an intimate White House gathering on February 7, 1843. Tyler flirted with both Gardiner sisters, but asked Julia to join him alone for a game of whist. When it was time to leave, the president first kissed Margaret’s hand and then approached Julia, who, playing the coquette, turned away and raced down the stairs. The president, dodging chairs and tables, ran after her. Margaret thought it “truly amusing,” but to those who knew Tyler, such behavior was entirely uncharacteristic, so different from the younger man who refrained from kissing his first wife until just before they wed. Tyler, in a juvenile frolic, apparently did not care who saw him. At a Washington’s Birthday ball on February 22, 1843, he asked Julia to marry him. “I had never thought of love,” she later noted, “so I said ‘No, no, no,’ and shook my head with each word, which flung the tassel of my Greek cap into his face with every move. It was undignified but it amused me very much to see his expression as he tried to make love to me and the tassel brushed his face.”

Julia’s hesitancy might be explained by fear of how her parents would react to the news that she could become the wife of a man thirty years her senior, older even than her own mother. And there were other suitors, including fifty-seven-year-old Supreme Court associate justice John McLean; South Carolina congressman Francis W. Pickens, a widower with four children; and midshipman Richard W. Waldron, a mere twenty-three years old. Learning that the Gardiners intended to leave Washington, Tyler again proposed, hoping he and Julia could be wed in November, prior to the opening of the next Congress and the start of the social season. In Margaret’s presence, he talked openly “of resigning the Presidential chair or at least sharing it with J[ulia],” anything to win her heart. But Julia remained uncertain and when her mother, who was concerned that Tyler was not wealthy enough to provide for her, demanded that Julia wait until she knew how she really felt about the president, Julia agreed. She and her family returned to New York in late March as planned.³⁶

With Julia gone, Tyler turned to the other “great object of his ambition,” the acquisition of Texas. Its annexation, Tyler believed, “shall crown off my public life … I shall neither retire ignominiously nor be soon forgotten.”³⁷